Some Results of A Survey of Young Women's Opinions on the Number of Children in A Family

Abstract

Recently, in conjunction with the reduction and stabilization of mortality, the birth rate has been acquiring an increasingly important role as the major factor in population growth. Natality itself is a process more readily subject to regulation. In other words, people's conscious behavior in terms of producing children has a definite influence on birth rate. Under these conditions, study of the opinions of married couples as to the number of children a family should have possesses both cognitive and practical significance in birth rate and population forecasting. It should be observed that scholars, in studying the opinions of married couples, particularly women, place special emphasis on such questions as the ideal number of children, the number desired, the planned and anticipated number, etc. Virtually all investigators, both in our country (Darskii, Belova, and others) and abroad (G. Acsadi, D. Vasilev, M. Popov, R. Pressat, P. Whelpton, etc.), pay special attention to studying questions pertaining to ideal and planned family size. The number of children planned is studied by retrospective surveys of women. Therefore, caution is needed, in our opinion, in approaching data on planned family size, because the surveys are taken not at the time of marriage but considerably later. In recent years sampling surveys have been done in Czechoslovakia and the United States among young women planning marriage in the immediate future. In the USSR the Economics Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences is conducting a study of this kind.